The Eye Patch Lady Took My Baby Away

The universe and the TARDIS. The TARDIS and the universe. Two vast, complicated and utterly bewildering entities that defy explanation until a bow tied gentleman takes you aside and shows you a neat little trick that seems to both make sense and somehow hover above explanation.

In a lab, you might see a bow tied gentleman scratch on a blackboard a cat in a box that is both alive and dead that he insists with a wide-eyed smile, pretty much sums up one way of looking at things, until all you can do is smile, agree and doodle pictures of cats in your notebook.

While in a less tedious lab another bow tied gentleman might show you the once believed to be mythical creature murdering pirates aboard their galleon is in fact using reflections to get her glowy green hands on their scurvy bones – a theory he then puts into practice by smashing every reflective surface that glints in his eyes.

The one constant in both universes is thus: ‘bow tied gentlemen will explain everything’ and as a suffix the universe is a little colder than the TARDIS.

Amy’s predicament means that only one of those multi-tasking soothsayers in spurious neckwear can help her – and it’s not the Doctor.

Stepping back into the fluorescent fug of the metaphorical lab our bow tied gentleman might be able to shed some light on Amy’s non-pregnancy and why the TARDIS is less effective than Clear Blue at predicting it.

The Double Slit experiment (or Young’s Experiment) is one of those neat little tricks that boggles and impresses but also one of the handiest ways of summarising the awe inspiring madness that is Quantum Mechanics/parallel universes.

The experiment involves particle beams fired from a single light source that passing through two closely spaced slits, often interfere with each other in different ways.

Logically speaking you’d expect them to form along the back wall in the gaps between the slits in two recognisable splodges but results have shown that particles have also appeared behind one of the slits blocking their path.

The only explanation is that the single particle has separated, passing simultaneously through both gaps before reforming in an otherwise impossible to reach space on the back wall.

Amy is the equivalent of that single particle passing through two spaces simultaneously- she exists in two places at the same time.

When the ‘Eye Patch Lady’ or Madame Kovarian to give her the name listed on actress Frances Barber’s CV first peers in on Amy in Day of the Moon where she appears to be speaking to an unseen person behind that door: “No, I think she’s just dreaming.”

It’s as if she’s pre-empting the audiences response to her presence. Its seems far too neat to be a dream – a definite trait that Steven Moffat doesn’t have is a willingness to take the Pam Ewing route out of anything.

A short hop along the explanation stepping stones from ‘dreams’ would be ‘memories’. Is Amy remembering events that occurred during the days when she was kidnapped by The Silence? This would imply that the Eye Patch Lady was experimenting on Amy but this doesn’t explain why they would need Madame Kovarian if they could already easily control the human race (also how would Amy remember without reminding herself to remember her? Is sleep the suggestive technique she uses to prompt her memory like the auto-suggestion of the human race shooting on site?)

Perhaps Amy was part or is part of a force pregnancy. The advice given to her by the Eye Patch Lady in The Curse of the Black Spot: “It’s fine. You’re doing fine… Just stay calm” has the ring of a midwife’s and it would explain why she was present at the birth – she’s a broker for whoever wants the child that Amy is carrying.

So why isn’t Amy showing?

The logistics of being pregnant onboard a time machine are a pedants heaven. Hopping from one time zone to another, from one period to the previous, you’d have a hard time telling when one day ended and other began let alone being able to keep a record of when nine months had passed.

The growth of the baby means you would have a general idea but not an exact due date.

When travelling in time you still keep your relative age despite travelling back or forward in time. You don’t shrink down to DNA when you enter the middle ages or crumble to dust on the surface of New Earth so why is the TARDIS having such a hard time telling whether or not she is pregnant.

Like that particle (and that cat scribbled on the black board in the metaphorical lab) Amy seems to exist in two states at once.

One where she’s pregnant and watched over by the Eye Patch Lady and another where she isn’t and is travelling around with the Doctor and the TARDIS can’t differentiate between the two because they’re the same person.

What’s still to decide is the moment when she ‘split’ the moment when something decisive happened, creating the confusion in the TARDIS’ readings.

Andrew has left Kasterborous. Any article that appears on the site past February 2016 claiming to be written by Andrew Reynolds has been done so maliciously and without the authors consent. The author does not condone gambling in any form and would not seek to publicise the industry through a children's television show. If you like Doctor Who articles without a hefty dose of identity theft and gambling spam, why not check out http://thedoctorwhocompanion.com/